My goal with this animation was to create something that showed of the mix tape covers and in some way have them all fly int to main logo/title. In that sense I made what I wanted, however the look the I have ended with is not what I envisioned. I see many many things that I would change/fix but I needed to get this animation out of my computer so I can work on some other stuff.
I made this in Cinema 4D using mograph for animating the mix tape covers. The mograph shader came in real handy for applying the mix covers. The compositing I did in after effects. I wanted to try and emphasize the sound track and the music since the site is all about music so I added the sound waves to the corners that actually go with the sound in either the left or right channel. The also get brighter/zoomy along with the whole scene when the beat kicks in.
This is a 3D Model I made based off of kidchuckle’s Mecha Nut Cracker X-mas Card. My model is a little bit different from the original illustration since I couldn’t figure out how some parts would work together and still allow it to move. And since my end goal it to Rig it and animate it I had to keep that in mind.
The model took me quite a while working on it off and on. Getting the bump texture took quite a while to get it right. Originally I was going to go with a brushed metal effect, but it didn’t quite look right so I found this diamond bumpy texture and it worked out a lot better. The rest of the model was composed using extruded splines that I made based of the design in side profile & primitives. The cuts I made I made with Booles or just two parts off a primitive or extruded spline.
I still see some errors that could be worked on & there are probably some things I missed but I wanted to get to the next step and make it shoot stuff and drill into something.
Also the other day I posted another model I made based off a vector design from Go Media vector pack on my Deviant Art page.
DuckDuckGo is a new search engine that I have been using for about a week or so now. It pretty useful for get information without having to do a lot of searching courtesy of their “zero click info” box. I have yet to use 100% yet, something’s I still use google for like maps and images but there are plans to implement some of these things.
The idea for this quick logo animation just came to me for looking at their search page at their logo and thinking it would be cool to see it quack. So I decided to make a quick animation that would involve the duck quacking. I did a quick outline that involved the duck duck goose game to tell about the search engine since that where the name came from. Originally I made the re-made the logo then found their forums where they had the Illustrator version…mine was almost exactly the same.
My animation turned out ok I think, I notice now that the Go bounce looks a little off but that may just be because I’m going frame by frame. I used my copy of the The Animators Survival Kit to try to get the bouncing right. I haven’t done a bouncing ball since my third year of college. I also noticed that the head looks a little too stiff when the duck is quacking I think adding some more movement to the top beak might have made it look even better.
The second item I would like to share is the process page of capacity If you have watched NBC or Cartoon Network there is a good chance you have seen some of their work. They have been featured on motionographer a few times but for some reason I don’t recall checking out their site. Not sure how I came across their site this time but I started looking through their site and found their gold mine of a process page which has break downs on some of their projects.
Finding out the ideas behind a project is really cool and it’s even cooler that they share their process. It is always very enlightening when you can find out the why behind the what of a project. I listed bunch in my delicious account that I just started using recently. I also listed three of breakdowns in my new fav category I created just for them. This reminds me of perceptionnycbreakdowns that will promptly be added to my delicious soon.
This is an match-moving animation I worked on for the PFhoe AE-Tuts Contest. My original idea was to do a family circus path line after a few lines of text. You can see a test of this on my 365 page. I was going to do this in Cinema 4D but the path looked like it was sliding awkwardly. I tried it in after effects and it looked off as well. So I scraped that idea and went with an all text approach.
I found a good quote that went from negative to positive and animated the last word in each part. This allowed me to keep my overall idea of going from dark and dreary to positive and happiness. I used some color correction techniques from the Color Correction Handbook I won from AENY to try to simulate going from a dark grey scale dreary world to a lit up bright happy world. I think I should have pushed the end color more but it didn’t quite feel right the way I was going. I also added a moon in, which is hidden/blurred most of the time, some depth of field and a glow sun at the end.
I’m not sure if this will get in or not since I did submit after the deadline of midnight. For some reason I though it would be tomorrow’s midnight, which of course would be 7th not 6th. So shame on me for not understanding the due date.
Lastly for the list of all the thing I need to fix. I won’t be submitting these but it will be good just to make it more final.
overall text feels…odd…not sure what it is though
Some of the text’s fade out seem a little quick I need to adjust for that
I seem to have lost the depth on the Annoy letters, need to fix and re-render
When the JOY text comes in there a blur on the whole thing, not just the joy
The Joy doesn’t seem real joyous, need to add some more pop to it
The Joy floats back and thought I knew how I did it but apparently not and I feel like it is out place even though I liked it at first
end was click in the audio
shadows… there are none in the scene but putting stuff in the scene need shadows to make it feel there. Not sure what to do about that.
For some reason the other day I felt like I need to model something. So I went to my basement and digded through 3 or 4 bins of old toys and I wound up with three; Leonardo Ninja Turtle with spinning arm action, Old original mini transformer, and Nickelodeon Hand Clapper from McDonald’s I think. I ruled out the Ninja turtle from the beginning, it was just to play with, and went with the Hand Clapper.
It took me about me a while to get the base of it done. I tired to model this the more correct way rather then my normal quick way of cutting everything using booles. Adding some details and getting the edges right took another hour or so. I was going to keep adding more detail to make it as close to the toy as I could be then I got the Idea for some Xpresso and finished quickly and jumped into that. That might have been the reason I didn’t model the hands ( model from turbosquid ).
The Xpresso in this project is not too complicated, I liked all the moving parts (trigger, applause sign & hands) together so they move in tandem with each other like the toy does. I also have an automatic switch that allows the hand to clap on their own without any keyframes. Originally I had this setup planning to use if statements to switch it and increment the value, then I found this forum post which showed an easier way. All you have to do is choose the speed and range you want it to clap and hit play. You can also adjust the curve to create some unique claps. There are switches for high quality as well.
That’s pretty much it. You can download the model with the Xpresso setup and use it anyway your like. I’m rendering out an animation with it and will post it when it is finished.
Today I’m sharing my work in progress for my Designers.mx animation & my playlist of my favorite songs(so far) that I have added to my grooveshark music. I found out about Designers.MX from Colin Oakes via twitter & since then I have listened to it a lot. Its a site where you can listen to music mixes by really good designers who also design a cover for their mixes as well.
I have gone through probably 75% of all of them and I can’t think of one where I didn’t like listening to it even if the music was different from what I normally listen too. Below you will fin a playlist widget I setup through grooveshark where you can listen to my favorite songs so far. This will update automatically as I find new songs I like.
Since I have listened to music so much on Designers.mx I thought I should make an animation about it. Below is my early work in progress for the animation. My goal is to use the covers have them fly though space and eventually run into the triangle part of the logo.
I have an outline of what I want to happen with a pseudo storyboard, I’m just going though it and figuring out how to do what I have planned out. Animations still really rough right now but my idea comes across some what.
I though I should share my result for roberleger.net Xpress0 Task 7. The first file below has my setup for the product table. My setup is pretty straight forward with only one extra flair for a custom shape. I would suggest looking at the results page to this lesson and checking out the other solutions.
The second file is part of my lego swirls file that I used to make the animation for this lesson. It’s not the whole file since I did buy the model but it has the rising tunnel and the lego parts as they swirl around. I though it might be cool to post up how I solved this task. There are a couple of ways to go about it and I choose my method because it gave me the look I was going for but an alternative could have work just as well.
This is my submission for Robert Leger’s Xpresso Task 7. The task was to create you standard product table. After the last hair puller the straight forwardness of this one was welcomed. This one was hosted by Ryan Hamilton, a xpresso task regular who is always producing some great work. To add even more awesomeness to it this one is a contest of for an Iphone App…although I don’t have an Iphone.
As far as the xpresso setup I didn’t hit any major snags while building it. I did however run into an issue where instead of using the radius of the shape to control the size I used the scale so I wouldn’t have to link up each different shape. My main reason for this, besides not wanting to make a bunch of connections over and over, was so I could use any custom shape. So I used scale with a small increment to make it seem like the radius is getting bigger.
I didn’t add any other features to this one like I normally do. Instead I focused more time into creating this animation.
Lego Mario Build Up
I wanted to do something then just have a random product on a table with it rising. My original idea was to have mickey mouse’s head and shoulders one the table and have it rise up as the ears rotate around and land on his head. I couldn’t find a good model of his head and I didn’t want to take the time to build it, so I did some brainstorming and thought a lego would be cool to build up.
I found this model of lego mario on 3d ocean and figure it would be cool to use. After that I just built the scene up and made a little Xpresso setup for the body parts. Then I created the swirling blocks to wrap around Mario while the product table(tunnel) goes up.
It’s a standard effect of sorts but it does look cool I think. I think I was inspired by the stop-motion like work of a recent lego spot that was on tv (web since I don’t have cable),
This is my final animation for the I Kill Giants spot for a fictional motion comic. In my previous post I talked about my reasoning behind the project so for this one I thought I would just pick a few scenes from the animation and talk about them and the overall animation.
Overall the animation process went well, I worked in a bit pretty much every night in some fashion. You can see my progress for each day on my 365 project, it pretty much took over for the past week or so. The animation in the beginning up until the action scenes stayed pretty much the same from my original storyboard. I didn’t have any big issues working on those scenes. I did have to take out the artifacts, moiré patterns, which came when I scanned some of the images. It wasn’t big issue on these images but on later ones is was very noticeable.
The I Kill Giants scene that begin the action scenes stayed true to my storyboard/animatic. I added some sfx for the word bubble that might seem somewhat out of place but they match up with the ones that I have at the end. The giant in a row gave me a bit of trouble, the way I envisioned it didn’t translate as well in after effects. So instead of showing each giants full body I opted to just show their heads/upper body. I put a sky from another part of the comic as the back ground so it wasn’t just plain white. Having the motion blur on I think makes it look pretty cool although you can’t really see any detail about any of the giants.
The scene after this with cool perspective looking up at the monster is probably on of my favorite scenes. It was pretty much setup for the way I wanted to animate it and of course it had to roar after you zoom in. The sfx is actually from boss from duke nukem video game. [Random side note: Duke Nukem Forever, the infamous vaporware game for the last decade or so is actually coming. Check out the trailer for some typical duke nukem vulgar awesome action.]
The next scene that gave me some issues was when the hammer comes out of the purse. This 3 part sequence I felt might be kind of quick, but then again I did want this whole part to be quick. The glow out of the purse was another issue with the mask flickering but with the blur it seems to cover it up. I hope I’m not trying to depend on that too much.
The last part I want to talk about is the stillish action pose part where Barbra is holding the hammer. My idea for it was to make it look really cool and somewhat 3D like even though it’s just a 2D plane. Originally I thought of doing some camera projection but I decided to just stay in after effects. I went with have a camera pan around the image plane and had the main part of the hammer on a higher z depth. The made is seemed like it had some dept to it but move way too much. So I just did some key framing to reduce the movement a bit. I think the background gave me the biggest issue as far as what to use. I wound up using a background from another part that was the sky storm.
So above is what I ended up with this was a cool project to work on and I figured out and learned a bunch as always.
